My life of gaming – Reader’s Feature

Super Mario World – a memorable milestone in a life of gaming

A reader celebrates being able to watch video games evolve over the last four decades, from the BBC Micro to PlayStation VR.

I have just turned 40 years old and was reflecting on how lucky I have been to have witnessed so many milestones in gaming history. My first gaming experience was when I was around six years old. My aunt was a teacher and brought her school computer home at weekends. She showed me a game called Chuckie Egg and that was it, I was hooked on gaming. I can’t imagine how many hours were spent playing but my young mind was blown away.

A few years later I got my first computer for Christmas: an Atari 800XL. I still remember watching the cassettes loading for 20 minutes, waiting excitedly for the next gaming experience. The only problem was when I was looking for new games it seemed all the good ones were for Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum.

Fast forward another year or so and I awoke on Christmas Day to find a new C64 movie bundle with lightgun as a gift. Now I could play all the Ocean movie tie-in games and swap games with my school friends.

However, technology moves on and soon I was seeing Amiga and Atari ST games in the games magazines and they just looked amazing compared to my measly C64.

I asked my dad to get me an Amiga and one day he came home with a big box. Could it be? I opened it and my jaw dropped as inside was an Einstein computer with a load of discs. He had got it cheap off a mate and it was terrible. He did eventually get me an Atari ST but all the best conversions of games were on the Amiga, which I never got.

My sadness turned to joy when I learnt about the new 16-bit consoles coming out. I never had an 8-bit console and when I saw the Mega Drive I knew I had to have one.

In my town there was a games shop that sold imported games and one day after school my mum got me a Japanese Mega Drive. Again, my mind was blown by the graphics of the games and I…